Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 03/02/06 21:50

On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, David Smithz wrote:

> "josh" <joshbrainerd@yahoo.com> >
> The text resizing is still a big issue I would address (or be aware
> > of). Even more so when you get to the page with more text. In
> > Firefox and IE 7 (beta...but plan ahead yeah?), the text overlaps
> > and is unreadable if the user has their text size larger than your
> > given values.
>
> OK, probably good to start thinking ahead from now on. There must be
> an awful lot of websites our there that will suffer this problem
> don't you think.

A lot of pixel-oriented "designers" have decided that the web isn't
meant for what it was invented for, but merely as a canvas on which
they can live-out their pixel-perfect conceptions. That it doesn't
really work is none of their concern - if they can show it to their
sponsor and collect their fee, the end users of the web site are of no
interest at all - indeed, any of them who complain can be told that
the fault is with their own browser. It's nonsense, of course - but
as long as the "user support" staff work together with the "designer"
to mouth this party line, the end user doesn't stand a chance.

You don't have to follow that path. *They* still repeat this lie that
WYSIWYG, when anyone who has the remotest clue about the web knows
that WYSINWOG (what you see is not [in general, anyway] what others
get), or WYSIJOPR (what you see is just one possible rendering).

> Not that, that is a justification for ignoring it as a problem, but
> even some big websites seem to have the same problem.

Ain't that the truth, and, now that the pixel-exact merchants have
discovered absolute positioning, their broken pages don't merely fall
apart (which was unsightly, but not actually unusable) - they even
overlap their parts, meaning that important content disappears from
view, and some users may be unaware that it's there at all.

> Bearing in mind that ideally I want my fonts to be displayed at a
> certain size generally,

Stop "bearing that in mind", and start thinking that *you* want your
web pages to be seen in the way that best meets your readers' various
needs. A central axiom of web design is that web pages aren't meant
*for* the designer, but *for* a web audience. Read up whatever you can
get on "flexible design" or "fluid design" for the web context. The
plan doesn't stop your mainstream users from getting the visual
results that you were aiming for yourself, but it means your pages
adapt themselves much more comfortably to other needs.

good luck

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